The following is adapted from $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner, Grand Central Publishing (2009). The world’s airline executives stare at the very real possibility of disaster every day. If they don’t outwardly acknowledge that they’re living on leased time, they think it. They think it every hour of every day that they show up for work. Everything that airlines have done in the last five years–paring their workforces; charging for checked baggage; stripping away in-flight meals; raising mileage requirements for reward flights; asking $4 for a tiny package of Oreos; and generally thinking up fees for anything they can–has been done to offset the concrete baluster of fuel prices steadily dragging them toward extinction. There has been no industry in the history of the world that has defied the simple laws of economics as long as the airline business. How do the major traditional carriers of the United States–United, American, US Airways, Delta, Northwest and Continental–survive year after year? American stock market investors have a strange affinity for airlines. The airline model, which, even in the best of times, has small […]